nukes

“Do you want to see a tactical nuke?” Pandemic’s Willie Rosas asked me.

It’s not often you hear this question. When you go to press events. developers or producers usually want to show you some cool new feature or a novel wrinkle to the control scheme. A blast from an apocalyptic thermonuclear weapon falls somewhere down the list near chicken punting (Fable 2) and rescuing giant ice cubes (Banjo-Kazooie 3).

So sure why not? “Drew show him the nuke,” Rosas said. His Pandemic co-worker, Drew Marlowe, maneuvers our hero, Mattias Nilsson, near a high-value target. He’s one of a handful of enemies you need to eliminate in Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. He points a laser for an airstrike. Nilsson is about a hundred yards away from the mark.

“Aren’t you a little too close to launch a nuke?” I asked. “What about the fallout?”

Rosas assures me Nilsson will be OK. Marlowe has the god mode turned on and Nilsson is pretty much invincible. Five seconds later, a nuke drops and there’s this rumbling on the ground, dust kicks up and then a giant fireball rises into the sky. Talk about overkill.

“Pan up, pan up, show him the mushroom cloud,” Rosas said. Marlowe pans up and there it is: Proof that we just launched a nuke to kill one guy in a video game set in Venezuela.